By Mitch Abramson
 
In the old photo, Billy Collins Jr. is handsome and young. His eyes are shut, giving him the quiet look of someone who is sleeping. His skin is callow, with a shiny glow. The image, taken for Ring Magazine in 1983, suggests that Collins is a corpse.

He is indeed alive in the photo, but soon he will be dead.

The snapshot is one of the enduring images of the fight between Collins and Luis Resto at Madison Square Garden on June 16, 1983. Collins, an undefeated prospect, was beaten to a lavender pulp by Resto in a 10-round junior middleweight bout.

After the fight, as Collins Sr. went over to congratulate Resto on his win, he realized that Resto had fought without padding in his gloves, a deed that would bring Resto and his trainer jail time and would get them thrown out of boxing.

Once a ballyhooed prospect, Collins never fought again. He was plagued with blurry vision and depression. Not long after, he would drive his car off a road in Tennessee, falling to his death at 22.

After the fight, Resto was convicted of assault, conspiracy, and criminal possession of a deadly weapon. He did 2 ½ years of a three-year sentence. His trainer, Panama Lewis, was found guilty of the same crimes, along with tampering with a sports contest. He also served time. The fight was later changed to a no-contest.

The circumstances of Collins death, and the after affects of the fight are chronicled in a new documentary called, "They came to Fight," (formerly titled, "Cornered"), produced and directed by Eric Drath, who is no stranger to the sweet science.

Teddy Atlas once called Drath a "friend to boxing," and it is an apt description.
Drath, now 37, has worked in the sport in one form or another, as a fight agent, a manager, a driver- taking fighters to the airport and picking them up; he supplied towels to promoters, produced boxing shows for TV. He even wrote stories for Boxing Digest.

"I just got involved anyway I could," he said during a recent interview at his Manhattan offices.

Now, instead of working from the inside, he is stepping back and working as a journalist, his natural profession. Drath is a former field producer at CNN and Fox, ("I helped start the Fox News channel," he says), and for nine months, he was consumed with making this documentary, basically answering a vital question that tugged at his heart.

Mainly, was Luis Resto aware that padding had been removed from his gloves on that broken night?

It’s a simple question that Drath had a tough time answering because of his fondness for Resto, and a friendship that developed the first time they met nearly a decade ago.

"A lot of people still aren’t convinced that Luis Resto knew about what was happening," Drath said. "Or that Resto even had tampered gloves. That’s what set me off to do the movie, to really find out the truth, and what we found out was much different than a lot of the perceptions out there. Things that will come out in the movie never before came out to the public, and some of the stuff is really dumbfounding and will really surprise people, both in a good way and in a bad way."

The film has been chosen for the 29th annual IFP Marketplace, a platform for independent filmmakers. “They Came to Fight” will be shown during the week of September 16 in Manhattan. Drath hopes the film is selected for the prestigious Sundance Film Festival.

“There’s never been a film like this, on this topic,” he said. “Everyone I spoke to in boxing said this film had to be made.”

Everyone it seems has a story of how they were first introduced to boxing, and Drath is no different. He was initially brought to a Joe DeGuardia show in Yonkers by a friend, and was hooked immediately.

"I was so amazed," he said. "I decided at that point that I wanted to leave the news. I had done everything I wanted to do: I had interviewed Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger. I was impressed with the boxing, and completely riveted and I segued into doing PR for DeGuardia. I knew that if I made myself necessary I could keep on getting more responsibilities in the sport."

As a fight agent, he would go on to represent over 45 world title fights, owning a certain distinction as a supplier of opponents.

"My record was maybe three or four wins, and about 42 losses," he said, laughing. "I was in the opponent business, delivering opponents, guys who would go and look good losing."

He was so consumed with boxing that he found himself training at the Morris Park Boxing Gym in the Bronx, where he first met Luis Resto in 1999. Here he would go face to face with one of boxing’s darkest figures. Resto wasn’t a loud, flashy figure. He was living in the basement of the gym, inhabiting a small room with no bathroom or running water, still ruggedly handsome and itching to get back into boxing. It was nearly 20 years after his fight with Collins, and Resto was a pathetic figure with an unbelievable story.

"I was immediately intrigued by this character, not only because the fact he had been living in the basement of the gym in a 10x10 room, almost like a cell. There were whispers, ‘oh, that’s the guy with the gloves, that’s the guy who’s banned from the sport for life.’ I was like, how could a guy so quiet, so taciturn, so docile so nice, be involved in the most heinous and cruel thing in the sport of boxing? I couldn’t understand it. Immediately, my journalistic instincts jumped up, and I said, ‘I’d like to do a story about you.’"

He paid Resto the rights to his life story, and the impetus for the documentary was born.

Drath’s background in boxing was useful, he said, in that it helped him handle the material with a bit of sensitivity.

"If someone else made this who wasn't in the boxing world, it would be a much different movie,” he said. “It would be a voice over with Liev Schreiber. Instead you have someone from the sport who is a friend of boxing, to steal from what Teddy Atlas said about me. I didn’t want someone else who didn't have a love for the sport tell this story. This story needed to be told by someone who’s not going to beat the sport up more than the sport already beats itself up."

One of the few people who wouldn’t go along with the film was Sugar Ray Leonard, who once sparred with Resto and declined to be interviewed, according to Drath.

But most everyone else cooperated, and the result, Drath said, is a wealth of boxing history, an introduction to some of the sport’s most iconic figures (Johnny Bos, the fight agent, whispering that he knows something that no one else does about the fight during an interview at Jimmy’s Corner), and the truth of one of the most horrific events to occur in a boxing ring.

Drath was meticulous in his preparation for the film, getting the minutes of the trial, building relationships with the DA’s office ("They did get convictions, and they didn’t want some young filmmaker coming along and disproving what they had done.”), contacting an undercover NYPD agent who used a wiretap during the investigation, getting full access to the transcripts, speaking to one of the jurors, tracking down Collins’ family in Nashville, Tennessee, and going to the site of the accident.

“It took a lot of hard work,” Drath said. [The Collins family] didn’t want to reopen a wound from years ago. It took a lot of calls and explanations, partly persistence, but once we showed them what we were doing and that we just wanted to get to the truth, they went along with it.”

Along the way, some unintended details emerged, such as what Aaron Pryor was actually drinking when he beat Alexis Arguello with Panama Lewis in the corner. (“It wasn’t peppermint schnapps,” Drath says.) Or, that a large bet was involved in the Resto fight, and that there was a drug lord in the mix as well, Drath said. 

Ultimately, the project became a labor of love.

"I wanted to be as objective as possible,” he said. “I didn’t wan to prejudge the story. I wanted to let the people in the film talk for themselves, and the viewer’s going to have to make a decision for themselves. We’ll provide the facts and they’ll have to make a verdict."

Mitch Abramson has covered boxing for The New York Times and the Village Voice and is currently a staff writer at Newsday.